That’s So True

November 14, 2009

The new Boots Christmas Ad parodies the Christmas lunch with a healthy dollop of the anthemic “Here come the girls” soundtrack from last year.

I love all the recent Boots Ads. They’re strongly driven by consumer insight, in a way that also manages to be highly product focused. The type of insights that Boots tap into, mainly highlighting obvious gender differences in common rituals, I think illustrates something really important about what an “insight” actually is.

Some people can get very hung up on the idea that insights have to be “new” to be a real insight. Often that means we as agency strategists, end up struggling to come up with “undiscovered” information on a brand, category or consumer base, when the reality is that our clients are already very aware of the finer dynamics of their business.

Alternatively, we do sometimes uncover morsels of information which are genuinely “new”, but these tend to be learnings which are weak drivers of human behaviour like “your customer’s favourite colour is teal”.

I’ve always found the most powerful insights into human motivation are rarely new – just newly exposed, interpreted or narrated. In the same way writers might argue that there are really only 7 types of storylines, perhaps there is a similarly finite number of truly influential insights. So in thinking about insight, maybe we should be focusing less on “I never knew that” and more on “that’s so true”.